Erin Lodes

Hey all! So it’s been a rather long while since I updated this blog, so sorry about that. The good news is the reason I haven’t been posting blog posts is because I’ve been spending all of my writing time working on my novel.

I SENT MY LAST TWO CHAPTERS TO JOHN YESTERDAY!

The non-writers in my life ask if that means I am done, to which I laugh and explain that most of the time when I “finish” my novel, it just means I’ve finished this draft or this revision pass. But even though I’m not done done yet, I am ten-million-thousand-billion times closer than I was when I last posted on this blog in June.

So let me just give everyone a quick update on what has happened in the last… I just counted on my fingers… FOUR — HOLY SHIT — months. I used the two-week break at the end of June to write the rest of my draft.

During the fast-drafting phase, I didn’t revise or edit (as much as possible anyway since I tend to do that at least a little as I go). I just wrote. I didn’t worry about it making sense, I didn’t worry about transitions because I find them difficult. I just wrote SOMETHING — at least 500 words — for every scene I had on outlined on my corkboards. Dialogue or description or blocking out the scene. Or just the emotions going on in my MC’s head.

Started with a 50k goal and ended up finishing closer to 60k. That was an amazing accomplishment. It felt absolutely incredible to type “The End” and know that what I had written down was closer to finishing this novel than I’d ever been before.

Then I kept going.

The last four months have been spent revising that draft chapter by chapter with John (for those of you just joining this journey, John is my writing coach/editor person). During the revision process, I deleted scenes, I moved scenes around, I entirely changed where I thought chapters were going.

I’ll talk more in the next blog post about at least one of the major hiccups that happened during this revision, but for now I’ll go over the basic process with John. I would send him a chapter (or sometimes two since I have relatively short chapters), and he would go through and make editing notes, both in-text edits and comments. Then we would go through them during our Skype session.

He always made sure I knew why he made certain edits. Why he cut out a word or the end of a sentence or maybe a whole paragraph. That way I would have that knowledge in my head as I kept going through the revision and hopefully would start making those edits on my own. We talked about everything from punctuation (we once spent about fifteen minutes talking about a single comma, which I absolutely loved) to character motivations to pacing to plot to honestly whatever the hell needed fixing.

After going through that chapter, we would spend the rest of the session talking about my plans for the next chapter. John could point out where he thought there were going to be problems and we would discuss solutions. Talking about possible problems with him first really has been a huge time-saver. Because maybe I would have discovered them on my own while revising but I probably would have made the mistake first and then spent forever trying to figure out why it was wrong. Or I would have sent it to John with the mistake in it and would have to spend more time revising it later.

I’ve learned so much working with John, and I’ll go more into the revision process more in later blog posts, but for now, that’s my little update.

How are your writing projects going?

How I Finished My Novel is going to be an ongoing blog series detailing how I finish this freaking thing. I know, I know, you could probably tell that from the title… I’m being helped along on this journey by John Adamus, who is amazing and you’ll hear a lot about him in this blog series.

If you haven’t already, check out Part One and start from the beginning.